Germany, The Next Republic? eBook

“Public life, like private life, would be very
dull and dry if it were not for this belief in the
essential beauty of the human spirit and the belief
that the human spirit should be translated into action
and into ordinance. Not entire. You cannot
go any faster than you can advance the average moral
judgment of the mass, but you can go at least as fast
as that, and you can see to it that you do not lag
behind the average moral judgments of the mass.
I have in my life dealt with all sorts and conditions
of men, and I have found that the flame of moral judgment
burns just as bright in the man of humble life and
limited experience as in the scholar and man of affairs.
And I would like his voice always to be heard, not
as a witness, not as speaking in his own case, but
as if he were the voice of men in general, in our courts
of justice, as well as the voice of the lawyers, remembering
what the law has been. My hope is that, being
stirred to the depths by the extraordinary circumstances
of the time in which we live, we may recover from
those steps something of a renewal of that vision of
the law with which men may be supposed to have started
out in the old days of the oracles, who commune with
the intimations of divinity.”

Before this war, very few nations paid any attention
to public opinion. France was probably the beginner.
Some twenty years before 1914, France began to extend
her civilisation to Russia, Italy, the Balkans and
Syria. In Roumania, today, one hears almost as
much French as Roumanian spoken. Ninety per
cent of the lawyers in Bucharest were educated in
Paris. Most of the doctors in Roumania studied
in France. France spread her influence by education.

The very fact that the belligerents tried to mobilise
public opinion in the United States in their favour
shows that 1914 was a milestone in international affairs.
This was the first time any foreign power ever attempted
to fight for the good will—­the public opinion—­of
this nation. The governments themselves realised
the value of public opinion in their own boundaries,
but when the war began they realised that it was a
power inside the realms of their neighbours, too.

When differences of opinion developed between the
United States and the belligerents the first thing
President Wilson did was to publish all the documents
and papers in the possession of the American government
relating to the controversy. The publicity which
the President gave the diplomatic correspondence between
this government and Great Britain over the search
and seizure of vessels emphasised in Washington this
tendency in our foreign relations. At the beginning
of England’s seizure of American merchantmen
carrying cargoes to neutral European countries, the
State Department lodged individual protests, but no
heed was paid to them by the London officials.
Then the United States made public the negotiations
seeking to accomplish by publicity what a previous
exchange of diplomatic notes failed to do.